Richard Powers - Galatea 2.2

And in the impenetrable confusion of referents, the eddy of knowledges seen and unseen, perhaps she gained a foothold in the ineffable. One as ephemeral as mine.

A noiseless patient spider, I told her,

I mark'd where on a little promontory it stood isolated,

Mark'd how to explore the vacant vast surrounding,

It launch'd forth filament, filament, filament, out of itself,

Ever unreeling them, ever tirelessly speeding them.

Okay. We knew about spiders. Living things. Small. Industrious, predatory, brainless. The list of predicates she might spin out was as extensive as the ways of overlap in her neurodal clusters. We knew about webs. We could make a kind of geo-retinoptic map of promontories. We knew more about isolation than words could say. As for vast vacancy, that was preverbal. Built into the system.

But what does it mean, Helen? My silence asked her. Her own firing and rewiring demanded meaning of the input, rushing her upended steady state headlong to address these new links. Only sense could comfort and minister to them.

What did it mean? I didn't mention to her that I myself could barely parse that first sentence or render it grammatical. What was with that spider? What did his exploration come to? What meant that "filament, filament, filament"? What did that unreeling purpose, and what's more: what did saying it signify?

She couldn't come close, of course. So I told her:

And you O my soul where you stand,

Surrounded, detached, in measureless oceans of space,

Ceaselessly musing, venturing, throwing, seeking the spheres to connect them,

Till the bridge you will need be form'd, till the ductile anchor hold,

Till the gossamer thread you fling catch somewhere, O my soul.

To snow-blind Helen and lay down forever the trace of ideational opaqueness, I read her "Absalom and Achitophel," followed by "Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot." She cut me off in the latter, in mid-heroic couplet.

"Sing." Some malfunction.

"Helen?"

She did not bother to translate my one-word, content-free question, but just repeated, "Sing."

Lentz, always nearby, supervising the supervisor, threw a fit. "What are you doing to her, Powers? The most complex and extensive neural simulator ever trained, running on the fastest massively parallel connection hardware in the world, and you're turning it into a blithering nitwit with no attention span."

"Philip. It's okay. This is what we want."

"Want?"

"Sure. She's bored by Pope and Dryden. It's only human. Trust me on this one."

"Trust? Trust you? After that last book of yours? How long do we have before you leave town?"

"Four months."

"Oh, wonderful. Four months until my utter, public abasement."

But I had no time for Lentz just then. Helen needed singing to.

"Sing to me," I discovered over time, meant make any music at all. My Jericho song, home-rolled, would do. She would accept chords from a MIDI file, digitized waveforms, Redbook Audio from off a CD, miked footsteps in the cafeteria or rain quizzing the office window-pane, the triad whistle of the phone company saying they could not complete our call as dialed.

Helen wanted organized, rhythmic pitches of any sort. Sound. She beat to steel drums, to the old Esterhazy chamber stringers, to gazebo brass bands from just off the right-hand side of ancient photographs, to tin-pan-nabulation, to the tinkling of a dead child's music box. To jazz, pop, funk, rap, gospel, chant, minimal, maximal. To fusions of infusions.

Most of all, she craved the human voice. Even after multiple listenings, Helen still thought all these voices somehow mine. She cloaked herself in the blur of swirled phenomena. Repeated training must have left her able to distinguish among the sounds and sweet airs, because she began to request some by name. Or maybe, as with baby Mina, the name did not mean the piece but stood for broader gauges — bigger triggers, knobs on a gigantic black box. Give me that again. The one that solves so many aches at once. You know. That. Goose.

Helen asked for frequent repeats of a certain North American soprano, a woman my age. Her pure high voice, in the service of spent music, made it almost possible to pretend for a moment that our worst political ingenuities were but the fierce vexation of a dream from which history might yet awaken. For a long time, Helen demanded, each evening before I logged off, this voice's rendition of a four-minute Purcell ditty called "Evening Hymn."

"Sing," she said. And if I failed to behave, "Sing 'Hymn.' " I could not leave in good faith until I put on a recording of this woman. Helen's soprano sang as if an angel toying with mortals, an Olympian back home in her sponsored village for an afternoon's pickup match. The voice sang as if it had never known or inflicted hurt, nor accepted hurt as this earth's last word:

Now, now that the Sun

Hath veil'd his light,

And bid the World good night,

To the soft bed my body I dispose.

But where, where shall my soul repose…?

Even I had trouble at times making out the words. I did not test to see if Helen could separate the sung phonemes or, higher, if a sung "sun" said the same thing to her as a spoken one. Higher still: if she could hear the sung "soul," and if she knew it to be roughly the same sound as "soul" in speech, then what, if anything, did Purcell's somnambulist have to do with Whitman's spider?

If she got that impossibly far, Helen would still not have been able to assemble the outermost frame. It amused her to listen to humans singing about the disposition, the disposal of their bodies at day's end, and their anxiety over housing whatever was left over. The text of this evening prayer could not have caused Helen much lost sleep.

She loved, too, that same voice as it haunted a tune named for its own first line. The tune, by Alfonso Ferrabosco, lodged at the turn of the seventeenth century. I don't know if Helen had a concept of epochs and succession, or whether she thought, as I did at her intellectual age, that all eras persisted somewhere, deep in the hive. I don't even know what she heard in place of these notes:

So beauty on the water stood

When love had sever'd earth from flood.

So when he parted air from fire,

He did with concord all inspire.

And then a motion he them taught,

That elder than himself was thought.

Which thought was yet a child of earth,

For love is elder than his birth.

Perhaps she liked the tune's abject simplicity. It did little more than ascend the scale, make a pilgrim's delaying spin, and wander back down again. Maybe the charm lay in that minute sigh vanishing almost before the mind knew it had begun, or in that voice, too sweet to exist in any world but the mind's ear.

These eight short lines required a density of keys that had grown unparsably more complex since their Renaissance casting. Even knowing the cosmological allusions didn't crack the conundrum, but made it more inscrutable. Each time Helen demanded that I "sing beauty," the song grew less solvable. After a while, I could no longer determine pronominal antecedents or order the terms.

The little syllogism defeated me. The "he" that ordered chaos must have been love. What, then, was the motion, love himself or something older? Which thought was "which thought" — the thought he taught them, or the thought that the love love taught them was elder than love himself? If love were his own elder, how did that make either of those thoughts younger than the earth that love made?

Untroubled by logic, Helen glided back to tonic. She seemed the maker of the song she needed.

I didn't have the heart to tell her how unbearable this music sounded, on the stage of events unfolding beyond the Center's windows. Her smallest textual interpretation would be meaningless without that context. Yet outside lay a nightmare I still thought her myopic perceptron maps need never look upon, even if they could.